Presentation (not) Zen

I don't like presentations

I don’t like presentations. For me it means a speaker with a monotonous voice reading slides. Actually it’s exactly what Don McMillan explained in his talk “Life after death by power point” in the funniest way ever!

[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lpvgfmEU2Ck[/embed]

Slides presentations are a cause of too many distractions for me. I never know if I should focus on the speaker or on the slides.

Presentation Zen

It was my idea of a presentation before reading the Presentation Zen blog of Garr Reynolds.
Although those ideas and methods of presenting aren’t new, they are for me. And yet most of the principles and methods explained are obvious.

In his book “Presentation Zen, Simple ideas on presentation design and delivery", Garr Reynolds described six principles under the SUCCES acronym.

The six principles are relatively easy to incorporate into messages—including presentations and keynote addresses—but most people fail to use them. Why? The authors say the biggest reason most people fail to craft effective or “sticky” messages is because of what they call the “Curse of Knowledge.” The Curse of Knowledge is essentially the condition whereby the deliverer of the message cannot imagine what it’s like not to possess his level of background knowledge on the topic. When he speaks in abstractions to the audience, it makes perfect sense to him but him alone. In his mind, it seems simple and obvious. The six principles—SUCCESs—are your weapons, then, to fight your own Curse of Knowledge (we all have it).

This SUCCES stands for:
Simplicity
Unexpectedness
Concreteness
Credibility
Emotions
Story

Still a long way to SUCCES

I have tried to apply those principles for any visual I create or use in a classroom

Here is an example of how I’ve used slides. I designed it to review some vocabulary about morning routine years ago.
Before embedding it, I changed all the icons using the Noun Project.
The picture below is the original version. I didn’t have attributions for the icons.

I have also made this presentation to introduce to my students their projects about presenting a European country.
I wouldn’t call it a presentation really. I wanted to show to my students what they could  include in their own presentation and how I wanted them to do it.
As I wanted my students to be creative I didn’t want to use too many pictures in it, so I just used words and icons.

I had this idea after reading “Living large: Takahashi Method uses king-sized text as a visual.”

Takahashi says he did not have access to photos or drawing programs either. So he was stuck with text. Still, he wanted to be different. He wanted to be effective. So he started thinking very hard about how to use the best word for each slide as he took the audience through his presentation. The words or phrases resemble Japanese newspaper headlines rather than sentences which must be read. His slides, though they are all text, are visual, visual in the sense that (if you read Japanese) they are instantly understood and support his talk. As he says, if you have bullets or sentences, the audience will read those and may miss what you are saying.

Finally here is one example of my Grade 4 student’s presentation.

[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hpwLm1bKrWM[/embed]

 

Although I found the principles of Presentation Zen very interesting, I still don't like presentations. However I know that I should, if not teach, at least explain them to my students. I want my students to be effective communicators and to reuse the French they know!

 

Images: Magali Brutel